The Failed US Anti-Drug Catastrophe in Afghanistan

Mr Sopko observed that efforts to combat drugs “have cost US taxpayers more than $8 billion since 2002, yet Afghanistan’s opium crisis is worse than ever,” and the increase in the area and quantity of poppy cultivation has been impressive and depressing.

Washington is well aware of the shattering effects of Afghan drug production, but the SIGAR writes that “counternarcotics seems to have fallen completely off the US agenda. The State Department’s new ‘Integrated Country Strategy’ for Afghanistan no longer includes counternarcotics as a priority, but instead subsumes the issue into general operations. Meanwhile, the US military says it has no counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan, and USAID says it will not plan, design, or implement new programs to address opium-poppy cultivation.”

It is amazing that “The US military says it has no counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan.”

The US State Department and the Pentagon were told by experts that the narcotics problem was immense. For example, in a speech at Georgetown University in 2014 the SIGAR said: “By every conceivable metric, we’ve failed. Production and cultivation are up, interdiction and eradication are down, financial support to the insurgency is up, and addiction and abuse are at unprecedented levels in Afghanistan.”

Nothing has changed since then. The 2017 aerial blitz failed utterly, as have so many plans and operations to attempt to reduce narcotics production, and the US-NATO military alliance in Afghanistan continues to flounder in a quagmire of insurgency. The drug catastrophe is plain for all to see, and after seventeen years of war and expenditure of eight billion dollars the illegal narcotics industry is thriving.

Just like in any other nation including the USA, the anti drug war is a HUGE FAILURE. Prohibition did not work, and only served to increase the crime, corruption and deaths caused by illegal alcohol trading by terrorists and criminals.

Will the US ever learn?

Insanity can be defined as doing something that absolutely never will work, and then repeatedly pouring BILLIONS down that same anti drug war hole, digging it deeper and deeper.

Hey, how about STOP DIGGING?

Copy what Portugal did. Copy what Denmark did.

They don’t have a problem such as the US does, with prisons filled up by drug users and dealers.